So I've Got That Going for Me

He's on the run in Paris with his uncle's girl and another guy's credit card. Some decisions start out stupid and get stupider from there.

By the time we're in the air, things between me and Annie have pretty much hit bottom. If I look at her from certain angles, in a very particular light, I see somebody I remember loving, but every other time I look, I find myself wishing she was somebody else or I was somebody else or even that we could just rewind the tape and go back to the part when we didn't know each other again. On top of this, my Uncle Sweets, the only man who ever loved me, wants me dead.

But things aren't all bad. A handsome fifty-year-old woman seated across the aisle tells Annie that from certain angles I look just like Liam Neeson. Or maybe it's William Hurt. It's somebody kind of famous, and by the time I finish feeling good about this, it doesn't matter. The Klonopin is kicking in, and anyhow you should see my shoes. Lucca Tezzis, brother. If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, don't skimp on your sandals. Even I know that. I bought them yesterday for about $7 million and had them polished twice in the airport prior to takeoff. Calms the nerves, I think. Keeps my head straight.

Besides, my favorite kind of air is airplane air, my favorite food is airplane food, and my favorite women are stewardesses. So I've got that going for me. I love to fly and it shows. Slip me an airplane cocktail and I'm not stopping till someone stops me. Going, going, gone. I can't get enough. Plus, things between me and Annie have only pretty much hit bottom. We've still got ground to cover before we're completely kaput. There's still something scuzzy at the bottom. And I like it like that. Scuzzy, I mean. Annie still lets me eat most of her snack mix is what I'm saying, and when her head brushes against my arm as she reaches for the in-flight catalog, I recall a golden age of frequent cock suck, feel something stir that I'd heretofore thought long dead. Annie still has it. From certain angles, that is. In a very particular light.

"In France, I'm going to wake with the rooster," she tells me.

"In France, I'm going to seek out the chansons d'amour and learn to sing them," I tell her.

"In France, I'm going to gain thirty pounds. I'm going to live entirely on the oeuf and the boeuf," she says.

"In France, you will finally meet the man I'm supposed to be," I say.

"In France," she says, "I'm going to break your fucking heart."

And on and on like this in the way we do--the back and forth and fast-forward that beats saying nothing, if only by a hair. Just enough chitchat to make us forget the vacuumy sucking sound of the cabin and, for me, just enough liquid to ensure that I'm 100 percent pain free by the time the stewardesses have their little hush-hush up toward the cockpit and decide I've drunk all the complimentary Stoli I'm going to drink. And my attitude is like, fine, so be it--like that's why I fly first class.

"You know, the only thing I still like about you is that you have no clue."

"No clue what?"

"Exactly," she says, kissing me for the first time in days.

We land in France without further incident. On our way out, the woman who thinks I look like Pierce Brosnan reminds us that we're a lovely couple and that this is Paris after all, and who can know what she means by this, though I wouldn't be surprised if she can tell just from looking at me how long it's been since my dick's been sucked. Or at least that's the narrative I'm imposing on things at this point. At this point, all my stories hinge on blow jobs, which means I'm wrecked, of course. Even I know that much. But so what? Who cares what you know? I'm a rambling man. I'm a rambling rambling rambling man. Blow me.

We take a shuttle to our digs, making the kind of talk you make upon first arriving someplace--the weather, the buildings, what we're going to eat. It's our first night in Paris, and so we'll stick close to the airport, acclimate ourselves to the Frenchness of it all, and work one of our least-promising credit cards at the Holiday Inn Orly.

At check-in, Annie does all the talking. In French. I can't stand it. I'll admit as well to being a little disappointed by the girl they got working the desk. I'd expected maybe something with a bob cut, something a little more Manon of the Spring? Definitely something more interested in me. But me, I'm pretty well shut out of things as Annie rolls her r's and the girl takes my credit card without so much as a nod. I'm left standing there with a tightened sphincter and a runny nose, hoping the card clears, while Annie and the French girl laugh about something related to my hair. The card clears, though, and I do my best to imitate Nick Norbert's loopy signature, and Annie points to our bags and says, Come on, Liam.

In the elevator, I ask what all that was about. Annie says, De rien, de rien, and I ask her if the girl at the desk thought we were famous, and Annie says, What? What's wrong with you?

Our room looks like any other Holiday Inn room you've ever seen, only Frencher. I turn on the TV. Annie heads for the bathtub.

She keeps herself pretty well confined there, chain-smoking Parliaments and making furious scribble in the margins of an article she's written for The Re-Animator Review about Annie Besant and the certainty of return. I keep mostly out of her way, mostly happy to let her soak, though when I can summon the courage, I sit on the toilet and try to think of something nice to say while waiting for her to say something nice to me.

So I say: "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing--and you've got it baby, you got it!"

And she keeps on with her scribbling.

I say: "How have you changed in the time since we've been lovers? I've grown more focused, better able to sit still."

But Annie's happy enough to lie there smoking and soaking and scribbling and whispering "motherfucker" in such a way that I can't know whether this is directed at me specifically or at any of the other motherfuckers Annie's run into in the course of her thirty-three motherfucked years. Truth be told, this is one of the things I still like about Annie: Her CV keeps reminding me that even here, even now, I remain many circles removed from some of the truly bad creatures roaming this planet. People who flirt with every waitress who has the misfortune to serve them, for example. People who hire Mexicans to clean their toilets and people who hire Mexicans to mow their lawns and people who hire Mexicans to raise their cocksucker kids. People who lie about their herpes and who leave their Mexican-raised kids and then fuck nineteen-year-olds working their way through state schools by dancing at the Gold Club, or fuck waitresses at places like Chili's and T.G.I. Friday's in towns on the outskirts of Dallas and in towns like Lake Forest, Illinois. People do these things. I forget that they do, and then Annie gets to cursing in the tub and I'm reminded that they do, and in the malevolent light of their actions, I shine, my brothers. I sparkle.

I MET ANNIE WHEN I was susceptible to the sulfuric appeal of these kinds of bad folks, when I sought them out so as to experience the old saw about misery and company. My Uncle Sweets made this possible. Before I was rescued by Sweets, whenever I'd been miserable (and I'd been mostly miserable), I'd been alone. Which is to say, of course, that I was broke, which is to say that I was, for a spell, the sad guy renting the sad studio in Montclair, New Jersey, living on pepperoni slices and getting beat up by late-onset acne. And that I was, for a while, the pissed-off English teacher who leaves his '86 Monte Carlo in the shop for three weeks while scrounging enough dough to buy a used exhaust manifold. Before Uncle Sweets, I rode the bus, for fuck's sake.

Then I lost/quit my job teaching school (Do you know how early 7:30 homeroom is? Do you have any idea what sixteen-year-olds are), and without a regular paycheck, things turned pretty skinny. Like Africa skinny. I mean to say that I grew thin. I owed much and paid 25.6 percent interest. When I could no longer afford buck-fifty slices, I lived on beans. After the beans, I lived on air. When the bus didn't come, I walked. Gray rain the whole of February and March. Bad luck dogging me like a limp. I called Sweets and started crying.

Sweets saved me just in time. I was thirty-two, on the turn, when he plucked me from the wet indignities of the Garden State and landed me in, let's call it, Fuckity Hills, Michigan. That's close enough. Kind of chichi little town in the middle of nowhere that thinks everything's all right 'cause you can get a copy of the Times with your chai, 'cause there's plenty of room to park your silver Ford Leviathan, and because the very few black folks walking around are all very, very Huxtable.

My uncle, he cleaned me up nice. My first haircut in six or seven months. Some lame but well made office casuals. A trip to the dentist, sleep without dreams, three pairs of Lucca Tezzis in brown, white, and black. And as if prompted by a little uncle love, my skin cleared up. The purple circles under my eyes grew faint and then were gone. I threw away my bad-news boots and gained a couple of pounds or ten. I started eating like a normal human being. Regular. Healthy. Meat.

Soon enough, I was so cleaned up that Sweets put me to work for him as an amiable sort of debt collector.

There was nothing shady about it. (What else is there but debt and the settling of debt) Mostly, I played golf with healthy-looking guys in Dockers. Married guys with pretty wives and terrible kids and enormous cars and enormous kitchens and Mexicans mowing their lawns. Guys with big arms and big thighs and a thing for teenage waitresses. Guys named Nick Norbert or Danny Diamonte, guys about my age, about my build, guys I might've gone to school with but didn't. Pretty good guys, all things considered, or terrible motherfucking guys, I don't know, what's the difference? It wasn't my job to like them or not, think them swell or awful (whose job is that); my job was simply to let them know that Sweets wanted a check. So somewhere around the thirteenth hole, after I'd done the trick whereby I chug a beer from the back of a plastic cup, after I'd teed off with the fake exploding ball, after I'd peppered them with a couple of jokes about ass fucking and some well-timed compliments on their aggressive approach to the green, I did a little business. This took all of ninety seconds.

"Hey, Danny, about those debts outstanding--I don't want to step on any toes, but..."

"Listen, I'll send a check when I get back to the office."

"Great, Danny. That would be great. Sweets would appreciate it....Now that's what I call attacking the pin!"

Working for Sweets was the best job I'd ever had. Most people have no idea--I had no idea--how many quasilucrative jobs there are in the middle of this country that rely on little more than a rudimentary acquaintance with Caucasian ethnochat--just bullshitting. That's all there was to it really, and I got paid a percentage of whatever Danny sent to Uncle Sweets. Sweets called it the soft visit, implying, I guess, that there was also a hard-visit option, but I didn't know that then. I didn't know anything then, and who did? I was strictly softworld. So was everybody, and in the softworld, nobody got mad, nobody got hurt. You just kept telling jokes, kept calling the cart girl over, kept everybody in drinks and in smokes and everybody smiling. Cracking wise, telling jokes, avoiding the hard stuff. No problem for me, my man. I'm an easy, breezy, beautiful cover girl.

So I stuck around in Fuckity Hills because I was good at my job, and I'd never been good at a job before. I was working maybe thirty, thirty-five hours a week, but enough so that I was making decent change for the first time ever. Plus, I had zero expenses. Uncle Sweets slid me a Visa with somebody else's name on it and the keys to a buttery Lexus and set me up in a furnished duplex at the Dell Estates.

At the Dell, I never wrote a rent check. I started with the weights again, and my forearms got big in a hurry. In between rounds of golf, I spent a good chunk of time at the chlorinated margins of the swimming pool. My smoothed skin turned brown. My hair grew thick and blond.

Outside of that, nothing much. I put my hand down my pants and flicked back and forth between the Spice channel and SportsCenter. I read nothing. I ate three meals a day and kept myself intravenously connected to a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. If I felt like it, I went for a walk. The smell of cut grass, women on their way to play tennis, and nothing but gooey midwestern prosperity all around. Did I mention how tan I was? How my chest widened and my forearms swelled? Looking in the mirror got my hard-on. Once a week, on Thursdays mostly, I went to dinner at some kind of leathery chophouse with Uncle Sweets and whomever he brought with him.

"IF YOU KNEW six months ago that things would end up like this," I ask Annie, "what do you think you would've done?"

"I would've taken a bath," Annie says.

The bathroom turns clammy, choked with smoke, and I try to get Annie, if she won't leave the tub, to consider a fresh round of water. I'd also like it if I could be made a little more uncomfortable by her nudity, rewind back to the part when I was thrilled by the exposure of skin.

"You need to blow your nose," Annie says.

"Thanks," I say, comfortable with the familiar pitch of her breasts, the visible rib cage, the well-tended bush. "You know I can't go to prison, right? Really, I can't go."

"Who said anything about prison?"

"Do you know what would happen to me in prison?"

"I guess you'd be somebody's bitch?"

"Best-case scenario, I'm somebody's bitch. If things work out perfect, I'm taking it up the ass from a neo-Nazi. I'm sucking dick for smokes. More likely, I'm just getting raped. Wholesale. I'm getting beaten. By everybody. Do you know how much weight guys in prison can lift? Do you know what guys in prison can do with a toothbrush? Prison is something, like, you've got to be cut out for it, you've got to spend your whole life training for it."

"You should've thought of that before, I guess," Annie says.

"I should've thought about prison? How was I supposed to know that prison was something to think about?"

"Maybe you should go out for a while, have a look around," Annie suggests.

"I'm not afraid to exactly," I tell her. "It's just that I'm feeling a little worn out. Maybe I should get in the tub with you."

"Don't," she commands.

"What are we doing? Do you even like me?"

"I love you. Now why don't you leave," she says.

"But I don't understand," I say.

"Let it passeth understanding. Why don't you go?"

"I don't understand why we can't just--"

"Will you leave?" she says.

"Why we can't--"

"Will you go?"

"But where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do?"

"You should've thought of that before," Annie says, which is fast becoming her favorite line of all time.

"What should I have thought of? How could I know what I should've thought of?" And these are fast becoming my all-time-favorite questions.

BEFORE HE BROUGHT the big trouble, Uncle Sweets's dinner companions were standard issue. Faux blonds in black minis with deep tans and gold bracelets. Too much time, too much boob, too much white wine with dinner. When they weren't living off alimony, they were real estate brokers. Or they owned a dress shop or they were travel agents or retired nurses or stewardesses, or who knows what they did? Outside of silently agreeing with anything Uncle Sweets said, they revealed little.

I ate whatever fish was put in front of me. Sweets hardly ate at all. The women surveyed the restaurant in wide shots and seemed, in Sweets's presence, scared of everything and nothing. When you met them, they shook your hand. When you left, they kissed your cheek, and pressed close to their bronzy skin, I imagined fucking them, which was surprising since most of them were older than my mom and not surprising because I was about to break my own sad record for involuntary celibacy, and surprising again because doing so (fucking them, I mean) would get me dead quick, and not surprising at all because the ladies of Sweets, in their own sad way, were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

When the date made her way to the bathroom, me and Sweets would talk shop. This went something like:

"On Tuesday, I want you to get together with Billy Buford."

"Okay."

"Remind him I'm waiting on his check."

"Okay."

"On Thursday, you're going out with Scotty Smithwick and a couple of his guys."

"Okay."

"He owes big. Tell him I need 20 percent by the fifteenth."

"Okay."

"How's your fish?"

"Great."

"I think they cooked it in butter. You don't use butter, do you?"

"Me? No."

"Good. Butter kills. What do you think I weigh?"

"I'll guess a buck seventy-five."

"A little more than that, but you can't tell 'cause my posture is excellent."

"Is that right?"

"It is. Sleep on your back."

"Okay."

"Don't eat cheese."

"All right."

"If you get hungry, suck on a hard candy. You know that."

Things went on this way for the rest of our glorious summer.

Mondays: nothing. Up at eleven with SportsCenter and a couple of eggs. Poolside from noon to three. Weights, three to five. All Things Considered if I'm feeling up to it. If not, and mostly not, then Van Halen's Diver Down or Guns n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. Five o' clock: Back to apartment to admire progress of tan and build. Jack off. Finish last night's Sapphire. Drive into town for a snack. Rent video I'll end up not watching. Restock the Sapphire. Restock the eggs. Second thoughts about movie I've rented and will not watch. Make eyes at all women on way to tennis, on way from work. 6:30: SportsCenter. 7:30: SportsClassics. 8:30: Spicy Hot (jerk off). 9:00: order dinner (Monday night=Mexican). 10:00: take a walk (=smoke a joint). 10:30: Spice-channel redux. 11:00: SportsCenter. 12:00: brush teeth/wash face/apply aloe vera to anything red.

Tuesdays: repeat, substituting Chinese for Mexican.

Wednesdays--Saturdays: the workweek. Repeat Monday and Tuesday's schedule, except afternoons are now spent playing golf with Bill Buford, Nick Norbert, Scotty Smithwick, whoever. At night we drink Sapphire and get our hard-ons at the Gold Club. Topless girls all resembling marketing majors from Iowa, slinging baby-back fajitas to white guys in white oxfords. Good fun, I guess. Mostly I just drank a lot. Tipped big. Tried to let the girls know--I don't know what I wanted them to know, just that I wasn't, I wasn't exactly like Nick Norbert. Not really. When things wrapped up, I drove I-15 home, windows down, Gn'R cranked. The land was flat. The moon was huge. The sky a sheet of stars.

Sundays: Mostly I'd, like, repent. When the workweek ended and the tape was rewound, it turned out I'd told too many jokes. Laughed too much. And that was okay. I felt pretty funny from Wednesday to Saturday, but then on Sunday, all of a sudden, I didn't feel so funny anymore. On Sundays, I had a semistrict no-jerk-off policy, and I wouldn't let myself start drinking till dark.

In the absence of these, my favorite things, weird thoughts crept in. I'd start thinking about some waitress in some town like Chambourg Estates, Illinois, who may have left the kids with her mom and headed to the free clinic with a burning when she pissed and a nonworking phone number in her purse. I thought about Nick Norbert in line at the Sizzler buffet. His Ritalin-addicted kids digging it because they could load ice cream on top of their waffles, and Nick digging it because Sunday was for families. Because, in the end, he said, no matter how many waitresses you fuck in towns like Chambourg Estates, Illinois, all you got is family.

Family was the big whoop in Fuckity Hills. That's how Sweets explained the deus ex machina job he'd worked for me, and it's what Bob Boberts said at the end of every eighteen, after I'd paid for his pitchers and given him the number of one of the Tri-Delts stripping at the Gold Club. It's family, man. All those guys said it. It's family, they said.

That's why no work got done in Fuckity Hills on Sundays. No work except for the Mexicans who were out mowing the hybrid bluegrass that Nick had laid down across the front yard of his quadro-Colonial, Mexicans mowing the grass in front of the Dell Estates. No work on Sundays except for the Mexicans, the dancers, and the girls slinging nacho blue-cheese salad at the Bennigan's.

I knew that this was off, that this was something more than not right, that someday people would have to answer for this. Even I knew that. But when would we answer? When? And then, too, the sun was always out, and the pool was free to residents of the Dell Estates, and so maybe, I'd end up thinking, I'll think about what prevents the Mexicans from slitting our throats a little later. Because I had been, after all, cooped inside the house all day sans jerk off, sans Sapphire, and I was, after all, looking a little green. Maybe later in the day, when I'd returned from pool and gym, I told myself, I'd resume feeling bad for the waitresses and the Mexicans. But by the time I'd returned from pool and gym, mercifully, it would be dark and I'd have given myself permission to reconnect to the Sapphire. There was something about au pair girls on the Spice channel. Fuckity Hills, Fuckity Hills. When I was done feeling bad, I was so happy, my toes curled.

"WHAT ARE WE gonna do?" I ask Annie.

"I don't know what you're gonna do," she says. "I'm taking a bath."

"Did you know Sweets buried a guy alive once? Outside of Marquette."

"He's not going to bury you alive," Annie says.

"At a logging camp in Trout Creek, he axed a Finn, one limb at a time. He was fifteen."

"Why'd he do that?"

"The guy stole a pair of his socks."

"You should go now."

"If you were me and you had to choose between prison and Sweets, which would you choose?"

And I do. I leave Annie to finish her soak and head downstairs to the hotel bar, which, this being France, is called Peanuts.

The good thing about growing up in Jersey is that once you leave, things are never completely rotten: Nick's Discover card keeps clearing and a black-eyed French girl named Wendy keeps bringing me hamburgers with fried eggs on top. Luc, the bartender, pushes blue buckets of ice water my way, and I mix the cold water with the spicy Pernod, which has become my signature drink ever since I moved here to France. I can't get enough. I drink twelve or thirteen of these buckets, and I eat seven or eight eggburgers, and I'm fixing to eat another half dozen when the kitchen staff decides to call it quits in order that they might introduce themselves to the very hungry American who so digs their cooking. And when the kitchen staff emerges from their rank quarters all French skinny and all French sweaty, it turns out that they like the pastis as much as I do but also, on account of their being French, have a real strong taste for the expensive single malts. And what do they care how much a Glenfiddich costs, since I'm the one paying, and what do I care since, you know, my name's not Nick, either?

THURSDAY NIGHT, six months ago: That's me kicking it in the ferny bar of a leathery chophouse waiting for Sweets and his date to show. Me drinking another Sapphire and tonic. Me always drinking another Sapphire and tonic, and me flirting up the out-of-sight twenty-three-year-old behind the bar, saying, Really, you're a marketing major, saying, That's fantastic, there's always something that needs marketing, saying, You grew up here in Fuckity Hills?, saying, That's great, Fuckity Hills is great. And me smiling, right? Me remembering to show more teeth. Me pushing the hair back. Revealing it as thick and blond. Figuring in my head how much money I made last month, and then giving up, because, brother, I've got three hundred bucks in my wallet right now, and so what else do I need to know? In Fuckity Hills, me learning to never have less than a hundy in my wallet, me learning the difference this makes and realizing--kapow!--that this is the thing I'd been missing for so many years back in sad, wet Jersey. And isn't it funny, me thinking that the thing turned out to be such a simple thing, such a little thing a hundy is, and me kicking myself in the ass for not seeing it sooner. Everything you been missing, it turns out, has been nothing but a hundy in your wallet, and if you don't know that, brother, it's time that you did. Get yourself a safety hundred, sad boy, and you'll never walk alone. Me have it now, and having gotten it, me can tell you, that's why things were so easy. Easy as money everywhere I go. Easy as money with the girls at the Gold Club, easy with the twenty-three-year-old behind the bar--well, yeah, that and also the forearms, that and the Lucca Tezzis, the jacked pecs, the russet skin, the regular haircuts, but these things all follow from the money in my pocket, these things just happen once you carry the hundy. All I want to say is that if you're out there killing yourself, sad brother, you've gotta stop. You've got to stop thinking about doing all those other crazy things you're thinking you might do to improve the tone and tenor of your days, the things you think might keep you from hanging your sad self in your sad studio. Because they won't help. Not a one of them. No change in your worldview, no book about breathing, no woman who understands, no long-distance running, no giving up smokes, no giving up liquor, no short-term high-dynamic therapy, no omega-3's, no Saint-John's-wort, no giving up meat, no sitting zazen, no following kaddish, no laying your woes upon the cross. You've got to get beyond the hurts you've been dealt and the hurts you've doled out and focus your remedial self on the way of the Benjamins. Can you dig it?

And these are the kinds of wack thoughts I was thinking to myself, the kind of silent orations I was making to my former self and his sad brethren. If you pause the tape right here, you're looking at the nanosecond when I had everything figured out. Then Sweets came in with Annie and oh Christ, oh brother, oh boy.

WHETHER OR NOT you're having fun, time flies when you're wasted. But I'm having fun, too. Or at least something that passes for fun. Fun for me anyway, and I mean, things are going so good with me and Wendy and Luc and Genevieve and Camille and all the rest of them whose names I can't remember or can't pronounce that I forget about old, pruny Annie turning foreign in the tub upstairs. For a second, less than a second, I manage to forget the troubles that plague us and, in particular, the troubles that have plagued me since my inauspicious birth to an unwed nineteen-year-old Polish girl in Paterson, New Jersey. Yeah right. Hey man, even I knew these troubles weren't going to vanish here in France (even I know that) or in Dubai or Nairobi or Kuala Lumpur or wherever I may roam, but for a second I'd forgotten them, and forgot, you should know, is as good as gone. Rewound as good as undone. So good, in fact, that when my buddies inquire as to whether I like to do the karaoke, what else am I going to say? You know what I say. I say: "Yeah, I like the karaoke! J'adore the karaoke!"

And all my new French friends go wild with laughing, and strike me down if they (and because we're all French now, I'm including the men here) don't lay sweet kisses all over my pretty, pretty cheeks.

I sign the bill, which turns out to be however many thousand francs, in my loopy Nick script, and I know (even I know) that this is a lot of money to drop in a place called Peanuts. But it's not so much when you put this money thing into what one might call a global perspective, and to be perfectly honest, it doesn't bother me at all as long as I hear the sweet grind of the machine accepting Nick's credit. And if it's money we're talking, how do you put a price on friends like Genevieve and Matthias and Jean-Paul? What is their worth on nights like this, your first in France, with Annie turned so suddenly and soddenly cruel upstairs? A bargain at twice the price, I say. They come miraculously cheap.

A gaggle of Peugeots and Opels awaits us out back. The manager thanks me with more kisses, and we toast to the health of all air travelers, and I head into the French postmidnight, which seems to me now, with its tiny diesels and its whoosh of air traffic, both glamorous and dreadful.

THERE'S A TAPE always playing in my head--the movie of my life or whatever. Maybe you've got one, too. Like anybody, I'd rather fast-forward through the stupid parts. But as soon as I'm done fast-forwarding, the tape gets rewound, and when I check my head, there they are, the stupid parts cued up and ready to roll. Me watching me being stupid. Again. And again. A greatest-hits collection of me being stupid on a tape loop. That's what my head looks like.

Here's a scene: the ferny bar of a leathery chophouse. Me sitting there drinking, thinking that I got it made. Sweets enters with Annie. He's twice her age. He's got no hair. Annie's a head taller and knows how to dress. Like she's read a book or two, but black haired, blue eyed, long of limb. Easy on her feet. Lights out.

A smart guy sees this and says to himself, Man, that Sweets. How lucky I am to be related and how good it is to imagine that if I keep going the way I'm going, keep my head down and my shoes polished, that I may one day learn the ways of Sweets, may one day walk in his loafers, come into restaurants like this with a woman like that. In the meantime, way to go, Sweets. Here's to you, good uncle.

Whereas a stupid guy says, Get the fuck outta here. Jesus Christ, I can handle the frosted ladies of Sweets. I can dig that. But this woman is my age. I didn't know they even had this kind of Vassar-looking sister out here in Fuckity Hills. What's up with that? If Sweets is going to roll in here with that, what do I get, brother? What do I get?

Guess which guy I am.

When the fish has been served and Sweets is done telling me that I should get a haircut, when Annie says that she's at the U of M working on her doctorate in American studies, I might've said:

A. Really, what's that?

B. That's great. Uncle Sweets, how's your fish?

C. Wow, amazing. Who are you working with? I'm a big fan of Alan Wald. Is he still head of the department?

A and B are perfectly good answers. I know that. Even I know that. I could've done things differently is what I'm saying. But what good is knowing now? I know all the things I could've done, should've done. What good does it do me?

When Annie asked me what I've been doing in Fuckity Hills, I could have made quick and casual reference to how much time I spent at the Gold Club.

I didn't have to smile. There was no reason to push my hair back.

When Sweets wasn't talking, I could've kept quiet, too, kept my eyes on my fish and not looked up when Annie ran her hand through some hair of her own. I could've not told the joke about Canada, could've not listened when she laughed at my joke about Canada.

When we'd finished our fish, I could've pretended I was exhausted, asked to be excused, apologized, and gone home. Reconnected to the Sapphire. Cried myself to sleep. I could've done that.

I could've shaken her hand instead of kissing her cheek, not smelled her neck, not wondered.

I could've not called information for her number, and when I was given her number, I could've cut off my hands to keep me from dialing.

When she answered the phone I could've hung up the phone.

I could've pretended that I was thinking about grad school myself, that I wanted to know if she knew anyone in anthro. I could've said anything at all as long as I didn't say I want to see you again.

When Annie said, Yeah, I'd like to see you, too, I could've said, Actually I was only kidding. It's a bad idea. It's a joke. I don't think we should.

When I went to pick up Annie, I could've gone somewhere else.

Instead of driving out to Holland, we could've gone to Flint.

Instead of walking down to the water, we could've shopped for T-shirts.

When Annie went in the water, I could've stayed on the shore.

After that, it was too late. I started out stupid and got stupider from there.

BEAR WITH ME, sad brothers, it's a long story and I know you're in a hurry. We all are. I know the day job is killing you and your lady wants you off the couch. But please, don't go. Stay. Because at this point in the narrative, my night in Paris turns foggy, dissolves into a series of images more closely resembling the still photograph than the moving picture. The night comes to me like a mess of postcards, like a slide show. And if I'm dumb enough to subject you to a slide show, I'm smart enough to do it on the quick.

Slide #1: a karaoke bar. It looks like most of the VFWs I've had the misfortune to spend a lot of time in--fake wood paneling, fake-cherry table, nearly empty, full of smoke.

Slide #2: me and a big blond. Her name was Genevieve. Or Madeleine. Or Chloe. This is her sitting in my lap. On the wall behind her, the video shows a very German-looking couple playing hide-and-seek in an apple orchard studded with neon windmills. But Genevieve, you'll notice, ain't looking back at the screen. Genevieve, you'll notice, only has eyes for me.

Slide #4: This is much later in the evening (see, I told you I'd move through it quick), and now the place is empty except for me and my girl, Genny, and this huge motherfucker who called himself the Wolf. If you look closely, you'll appreciate the size of that guy's hands and understand why I took seriously his threat to shit down my neck.

Slide #5: This is the Wolf singing. Will you believe me when I tell you that he sang like a bird? That his voice was pitched quite high for a man of such terrible proportions and that it had an airy quality that called to mind Marvin Gaye if he was real French, or perhaps the sound of something falling from a great height? The sounds you might make if you were falling from a great height, say, a plane going to France, falling for three or four minutes, the sounds you might make before you hit the ground.

Slide #6: That's me with my driver back at the Holiday Inn. You can tell the night is over because look--I'm handing him my spare hundy. A lot of things were over at this point, which is something that I knew and something that I didn't.

THAT NEXT THURSDAY, Sweets brought Annie to dinner again. But this time my jealousies were curbed somewhat by the fact that Annie and I had spent the afternoon fucking like basketball stars.

We ordered our fish. Sweets asked questions about Nick Norbert, and I told him what I thought he wanted to hear, although, actually, I hadn't seen Nick Norbert in a while. Things with Annie had made it easy to fall behind at work. Annie helped me realize that, as it turned out, I hated golf, I couldn't stand the Gold Club, and that Nick Norbert was a pretty serious motherfucker. Still, I told Sweets that Nick was definitely sending a check, that I'd gone to see him just a couple of days before. I was surprised by how easy it was to lie to him.

For the next five and a half months, that's how things worked. Breakfast and lunch and everything all the time with Annie, then dinner with Sweets and Annie on Thursday nights. Once, I think only once, maybe a couple of times, I floated the idea that maybe what we were doing wasn't so smart. Annie said of course it wasn't, that it was a terrible idea, probably the dumbest of all time. And then we went to the movies or started fucking again.

Once, I remember this for certain, I rewind this all the time, I told Annie I thought she should tell Sweets she couldn't see him anymore. She should tell him about me. We were on our way home from a weekend at the lake. The windows were down, and behind us the sun was sinking in slow motion. From the angle I was looking, in that very particular light, Annie seemed worth the trouble this would bring.

"I don't want to tell Sweets," Annie said.

"Why not?"

"Because Sweets has been good to me. And because Sweets has been good to you. I love Sweets. I'm not going to tell Sweets."

"You love him?"

"Of course I do, and if you don't," she said, "you should."

She was right, and we didn't talk about it anymore after that. Besides, if you skipped the part about how on Thursday nights Annie left me to sleep with my seventy- year-old uncle, everything was perfect. This was still Fuckity Hills, man; everything was great.

Then I got the call from Nick Norbert.

"Hey big man," he said. "Listen, I want to talk to you."

"Who is this?" I asked, because nobody ever called me. Sweets had me call them.

"It's Nick," Nick Norbert said.

"Okay. What's up, Nick?"

"Why don't I come over? I'll stop by," he said.

"Wait, do you know where I live?" I asked. But he'd already hung up the phone.

Half a minute later, my doorbell sang its little tune, and Norbert was at my front door, red-faced and bloated. Some of these guys, I swear, they lived on the Domino's pizza. They never even heard of a little sunscreen.

"Little drink?" I asked, pouring more Sapphire into my Big Gulp cup. "Or would you rather head over to Bennigan's?"

"Naw," said Norbert, "I think we'll stay here."

"Cool school," I said, noticing the curtain-rod-like thing that Nick gripped in his hand. "So, what's up?" I said, and sat down at one of the kitchen stools, slapping my hands on my thighs, acting like I hadn't seen the curtain-rod thing Nick gripped in his hand.

"C'mon, man." Norbert sighed. "We don't really have to go through all this, do we?"

"Go through what, Brutus?" I asked, taking a long pull on my Sapphire and Sprite.

"Sweets didn't send me over here," Nick said, "to take you out for drinks."

"Yeah, so?" I said like a guy from Fuckity Hills.

"The thing with Annie was kind of the last straw, you stupid fuck," said Norbert, stretching the curtain-roddish thing over his head.

"Last straw?" I said.

"The final thing," said Norbert.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I said without smiling, looking to work myself into a place where I might be capable of laying some hurt on fat boy Norbert.

"I'm talking the hard visit, man. You've pretty well fucked the monkey," he said with a sigh, pulling his fat ass off the couch.

Faking it is making it, brothers. You know if you smile, happy follows. But if you clench your jaw, something else follows, too. I was where I needed to be. It was easy getting there. Everything is easy, that's all I'm saying. The air in my place at Dell Estates went flat and heavy. Norbert could try whatever he was gonna try with his steel ruler. I was going to kick in his head. Remember, brothers, I'd been lifting a lot of weight. So I had that going for me.

Some people claim that they see acts of physical violence in slow motion. But it didn't go down that way with me and Norbert. Things got real slow as he came toward me. Like he was walking through water, and I clearly remember grabbing the steak knife from the counter. That was real slow, too. But then the tape jumps forward and goes screwy, elongates itself, like it's getting mangled in the machine, then rights itself only when Norbert is done. Or done for, I guess. I don't watch that part much. I can't see it.

But I can watch me grabbing Norbert's wallet. I see this real well, and in a kind of slow motion, or not slow but perfectly clear, super high definition: I see me taking his credit cards, and then flipping through the folds of leather for his safety hundy. I watch this part a lot. I knew he'd have the hundy and he did. I was stupid, but I was learning.

When I get to our room, I throw my coat on the bed and turn on the TV and flip the channels because sometimes, even after all this time here, I can't believe they've got things like TV in places like France. Mr. Belvedere strikes me as a sad thing for French people to be watching at this time of night.

"Annie, are you in there?"

I mute the tube because I think I hear whispering in the bathroom. I turn the sound on again and then off again to be sure it's not just, like, residual squawk. But it's not. Annie's on the phone.

"Hey Annie!"

Something moves through me, something like nausea, if nausea were something that happened to your head. Brain sick.

It breaks down like this: Annie's on the phone. Annie's on the phone with Sweets. Annie's telling Sweets where I am. Sweets will send somebody to pay me a visit. This is how I will meet my end.

Hearing this, figuring it out, is like watching your dog get run over. Or the moment you realize, while slicing green peppers, that you've just taken off a good bit of your index finger. Or actually, it's exactly like coming back to your hotel room after a night of the old joie de vivre and discovering that your lover is whispering long distance to your uncle, that she's betrayed you, and that she's helping with the logistics of making you dead. Yes, that's what it's like. It's exactly like what it is.

The brain rewinds. The brain stutters. Annie's on the phone. But how do I know for certain that Annie's talking to Sweets? I don't know who she's talking to. She could be talking to her sister. She could be checking in with Alan Wald. I can't know for certain who she's talking to because I can't really hear what she's saying. I mean, part of me knows, my melted self knows, that she's talking to Sweets, but I can't say I know it for certain. Not yet. For that I've got to get closer; I'll have to get to the door, open it, listen closely.

But when I rise to do so, my legs have gone heavy and liquid. I crawl to the bathroom door instead. I open it a millimeter at a time. I do this for the next three or four hours.

When Annie's finished talking to Sweets, when she's finished telling him where we are and what we've done and how sorry she is and how much she loves him, and after she suggests a couple of ways in which I might be offed without too much in the way of suffering, she says "kisses" and clicks off the phone.

I'm real uncomfortable with her nudity now, thrilled by it in the way I remember. Oh, man, the easy sway of her breasts.

"Hey Annie," I say. "What's going on?"

And she says nothing in return, which is her way of saying, You're a dead man.

But I don't blame her for not talking to me. If I was her or if I was you or if I was anyone but me, I wouldn't talk at all. Talking seems like a good idea when you start, but when you look back, you wonder why you started doing it in the first place. If I was smart, I would've never said a word. Even I know that.

Annie's been in the tub too long. She's been worn out by it, and there's this terrible juxtaposition between the fleshy slop of her body and the perfect arrangement of her things--her cigarettes placed neatly on the edge of the tub, her pen at a graceful diagonal across her notebook. Or maybe it's just the tweaked-out hotel-room lights and the peripheral specter of my own reflection in the mirror. In any case, it's as though the tape has indeed been rewound, as though I am seeing her for the first time. And now that I've got what I wanted, the ability to see Annie again, I can't get myself to look at her. And on this one there are only two choices: I can look at Annie or I can look at myself.

I look at Annie, and I reclaim my seat on the toilet, and despite my resolve to never say anything, I say a couple of the things I'd meant to say earlier in the evening, things I couldn't say then, like the way I remember her eating cheese fondue once in a town in Wisconsin, I think. Something about the angle at which I saw her, how beautiful, I say. The sky's purple light, her auburn skin. I tell her how much I used to like it when she would pretend to be mad at me and ball up her fists and scrunch up her face and punch me in my arms and my legs. I say this and I say other things that are really too embarassing to mention. It goes on for some time. Things come in streaks. You can't think of anything nice to say and then, when it's too late, you can't stop talking. I apologize for this. Annie says it's no big deal.

I tell her that I feel like I've seen enough of France. She agrees.

"Where should we go next?" I ask.

"Where do you want to go?" she asks back.

"I don't know. There's Rome. But maybe Rome is no good. What do you think?"

"I think you should go to Rome. In the morning. I think you should go as far as you can get."

"What do you mean by that?" I ask, though, of course, I know what she means. Even I know that.

"I don't like you anymore," she says.

"Who asked you?" I say.

"You need to blow your nose," she says. "Are you sick? What's wrong?"

"I've got la grippe real bad," I tell her.

"It suits you," she says. "I like you best when you're not feeling well.

"But I never feel well," I protest.

"Some days better than others," she says, climbing out of the tub, looking as though she's lost fifteen pounds in the soaking. I hand her a towel, and she wraps herself primly inside. I feel as though I might brush her hair or put her in pajamas, feelings I don't mention, feelings I know she'd object to, but feelings nonetheless.

"Let's go to bed," she says. "You'll go in the morning."

In bed, beneath the heavy hotel blankets, which I've heard you wouldn't want to see under a microscope, she wraps both her legs around one of mine and squeezes. We could still be, I tell myself, a coupling that makes sense. I mean, yeah right, she'd turned me in to Sweets, and yeah, I'd have to get lost for a while, a long while, and I'd be found eventually, and I would suffer in ways too awful to imagine, but still...this didn't mean the was no, like, hope for the future, did it? I mean, fast-forward through a couple of painful obstacles and I could see us together. I could see us making it. It made a kind of sense.

I mention this to her, and Annie says that everything makes sense if you're tired enough.

"How tired are you?" I ask.

"I'm exhausted," she says, rolling away from me, turning off the lights.

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